Where is that idiot Klynical?? i see he hasn’t posted any poll numbers lately. that means president obama is doing much, much better. as a public service to klynical and all the resident wingnuts, i’ll do the posting today. Saturday, February 13, 2010 Email to a Friend ShareThis.Advertisement The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 24% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -17.

Heard Dori “We shouldn’t have to pay one thin dime in taxes” Monson lying on the radio yesterday regarding the proposed sales tax increase. Now as anyone with half a brain knows, sales taxes are regressive but Dori made the claim that he is paying 50% taxes. Uhhh…No. Even the lowest of incomes in Washington, those with the highest % of income going to sales taxes and federal taxes, aren’t even close to that.

then he agreed with a caller who claimed that the tax increase would take $13,000 from his profits. Really? You plan on lowering your prices 1% to avoid the consumer paying the tax? Monson, of course, didn’t go into the possibility equal net sales means no decrease in the businesses profitability. That wouldn’t fit his narrative. Just, “Wow, that means you’ll need to increase sales by $13,000 just to break even.” Uhhhh…no. If the business had a net of say $250,000 in 2009 and a net of say $250,000 in 2010 there is no change. But his customers will pay an extra $2,500 in sales tax. Any loss is speculative based on a “feeling” about decreased sales by “saving” consumers.

I suspect the wingnuts will likely point out that State employees on average have wages 70% higher than private employees, double the paid benefits and double the paid time-off on average. We have to avoid this conversation, even though it is true. Governor Gregoire has done a great job for us state union workers. We must have more tax dollars to support us.

Can you cite a source? I’d like to see proof that a private sector employee, say an office manager @ 30K compared to a state office manager that makes 51k. Or any essentially identical jobs that pay 70% more as a state employee.

And if public employees were Unionized by and large, the chipping away of vacation time over the last three decades wouldn’t have happened. It’s all part of the sheep following the mantra of, “It doesn’t matter how crappy I’m treated or that my workload has tripled with no compensation. Productivity is up. The shareholders are happy. At least I have a job.”

What happened to the righty mantra of higher salaries and benefits are REQUIRED to attract top talent. Oh, right. that only applies to the executive suite.

this is what makes me laugh about our socially engineered society. crack is mostly used by minorities, but there is a commercial by a drug free america orginization that shows an african american mom walking into a crackhouse to try to get info to be able to talk to her kids. but guess what our sorry ass society thats afraid to admit to truths does? are any of the crack users in the house minority? no, they’re all white. we do so much manipulation of facts that we deserve the future we are going to get.

Irrelevence on alert. So you make a generalization about Washington state and then you give me a chart on Federal? You don’t suppose that lots of states with a manufacturing or agricultural base skews the chart? If the majority of jobs in Kansas are low wage agricultural while the number of high-wage professional jobs are few and tend to be public, that clouds the data.

And even giving you the private industry vs. public sector (rounded 27.5K to 40K) the private sector employee makes 70% of a public. So even by your own chart, a public employee makes 30% more, mostly in benefits as opposed to wages, than a private sector. Even your evidence proves you wrong. (“State employees on average have wages 70% higher than private employees…”)

@12 And even giving you the private industry vs. public sector (rounded 27.5K to 40K) the private sector employee makes 70% of a public. So even by your own chart, a public employee makes 30% more, mostly in benefits as opposed to wages, than a private sector.

You are math challenged, you dope. Here’s what the chart says based on Sept 09 BLS data:

Look carefully at the charts you linked. They indicate the total value of the compensation package for the average private sector employee (that includes benefits) at 27.5k. It puts the total compensation package of the average government employee at 40k.

I did the math. Accurately. 27.5k is 70% of 40k. But let’s go back to your original quote that only described wages. 19k for private, 26k for government (rounded again.) 19k is 73% of 40k. So in your purely wage based argument, the average government employee makes 27% more.

And in your backtracking you want to now claim that the total is 44.87% higher for government than private. So where’s the 70% you spouted off in your first post.

You said it. Not me. Done.

“If X is P percent of Y, it DOES NOT follow that Y is (100-P) percent of X.” (That’s stupid. You have a value x that you state is a % of Y and then claim that Y is not 100% of X. Of course not, x is a % of Y so it is impossible for Y to be 100% of x unless the value of Y and X are identical. Logic! You were trying to appear smarter than you are, weren’t you?)

Sorry, but that doesn’t wash among intelligent people. You spouted BS (“State employees on average have wages 70% higher than private employees…”) and got caught. DEAL!

I did the math. Accurately. 27.5k is 70% of 40k. But let’s go back to your original quote that only described wages. 19k for private, 26k for government (rounded again.) 19k is 73% of 40k. So in your purely wage based argument, the average government employee makes 27% more.

Here’s what you wrote @12:

And even giving you the private industry vs. public sector (rounded 27.5K to 40K) the private sector employee makes 70% of a public. So even by your own chart, a public employee makes 30% more, mostly in benefits as opposed to wages

You’re CLEARLY referring to wages + benefits. And you got the 30% using the math-challenged reasoning: “if a private sector employee makes 70% of a public employee, a public employee makes 30% more.”

So when you come up with this @14:

But let’s go back to your original quote that only described wages. 19k for private, 26k for government (rounded again.) 19k is 73% of 40k. So in your purely wage based argument, the average government employee makes 27% more.

I bet you’d like to find new numbers. But you weren’t referring to just wages when you came up with the 30% – you were clearly referring to wages + benefits. And just to confirm how severely math challenged you are: 26K is 36.84% greater than 19K, not 27%.

You’re right. I see the error in my argument. But why give me federal charts when talking about state workers? And why, when calling BS on the 70% claim did you provide evidence and argue that 45% is 70%? (Or 36.84% is 70%)

I should have noticed that Jon and Johnathan were not the same person but when someone named Jon posts links to rebut a comment made to Johnathan, I’ll take a mulligan on that one.

In no example, so far, is the statement “State employees on average have wages 70% higher than private employees” true.

(Hey Puddy, look I admitted Jon has a point. Feel free to act like that invalidates anything I say in the future!)

The relative pay issue is a cute but irrelevant exercise. How many minimum wage jobs are there in the public sector? There are far fewer jobs at the low end of the pay scale in the public sector making this discussion silly. ANd while there are some classifications where public sector pay is higher (generally those in lower paying jobs) here are others where the public sector pay is clearly less- IT workers and engineers are examples I can personally vouch for.

The only reason I still have a State job is the unions. Frankly, my job and those of approx. 15 others in my Dept are unnecessary. However, if I was never hired or if I was laid off, I’d probably be flipping burgers. Thanks to the union, I have a home, nice car and pay $750/month child support to my -ex.

I get 44 weekdays off each year for holidays, vacation, sick leave, personal and a few other things. It’s awesome. Based on 52 weeks X 5 days/week=260 potential workdays..that means I don’t work 17% of the time.I get 1 paid day off every 6 days. My benefits also are awesome. I don’t care much about my salary. The unions are great at focusing on the idea it is way too low and ignore my paid time-off and benefits. BTW, my benefits last year worked out to 31% of my Salary. What a great deal. Too good to be true.

Actually, my uncle is self-employed. If he doesn’t work, he makes nothing. What an idiot. He has 25 employees and is all stressed out. He says that I don’t really get only 44 days off, but also every weekend. So I really get 44 + 104=148 Total Days Off with pay if I was compared to a self-employed guy. So compared to him, I get 40% of the days in the year off. AWESOME! I think everyone should work for the government and have the same deal I get.

one more thing- When you take my salary of $72,000 plus my benefits of $22,310 for a total off $94,310..I made more than he did and got 148 days off with pay incl weekends. He took off about one day a month. What an idiot he is. He owns a restaurant.

@7 State workers do get more vacation day — in lieu of pay raises. Whenever they couldn’t afford (or didn’t want) to give the workers a COLA the legislators gave them another day off. That’s the same thing as unpaid leave days.

@10 Which proves what? We’re not discussing federal pay, we’re discussing state pay. Federal pay is much, much higher than state pay for comparable work. A federal lawyer doing work similar to what I did for the state made more than twice as much as I did.

The only fair way to compare pay is what different employers pay for the same work. The state has conducted professional salary surveys for decades because that’s what the personnel department uses to set pay for various job classification. Through the years the legislature consistently underfunded the salary schedule by anywhere from 20% to 40%. Plus, there’s a trick they used to underfund it even more: They used the previous survey, which mean the data were 2 years out of data, which moved the baseline down by several more percent. State workers have always been poorly paid and anyone who says differently is a liar.

I looked at that chart in #10 and I don’t see any differentiation for education or job function. Nearly all government jobs require a college degree. Off the top of my head, I don’t know what percentage of the non-governmental civilian workforce is college educated, but it’s way less than half. They’re comparing the pay of V.A. doctors, CIA agents, and NASA engineers with truck drivers, waitresses, trash collectors, and retail clerks. That’s absurd.

If you read CAREFULLY dumb rabbit, you’ll see, using the precise figures, not the rounded ones used by czechsaaz, it is stated that in fact the total average compensation for public employees would be 44.87% greater than that of private employees.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out where the 70 percent claim came from.

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